Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) adds new capabilities to communications networks and requires a new set of management and orchestration functions to be added to the current model of operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning. In legacy networks, Network Function (NF) implementations are often tightly coupled with the infrastructure they run on. NFV decouples software implementations of NFs from the computation, storage, and networking resources they use. The virtualization insulates the NFs from those resources through a virtualization layer.
The decoupling exposes a new set of entities, the Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), and a new set of relationships between them and the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI). VNFs can be chained with other VNFs and/or Physical Network Functions (PNFs) to realize a Network Service (NS).
An NFV management and orchestrator (MANO) deployment is usually in the core/edge network functions virtualization infrastructure-point-of-presence (NFVI-PoP) (e.g., datacenters or telecommunication networks) as it is designed to manage and orchestrate the network services (NS) and their associated resources, which are within the confines of the respective datacenter (DC). For a further discussion of NFV-MANOs see “Network Function Virtualization, Management and Orchestration,” ETSI GS NFV-MAN 001 v1.1.1 (ETSI December 2014), the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference herein. Moreover, use cases and requirements of NFV-MANOs in multi-site environments are discussed in “Report on Management and Connectivity for Multi-Site Services,” ETSI GR NFV-IFA 022 v0.8.2 (ETSI February 2018) and “Report on architecture options to support multiple administrative domains,” ETSI GR NFV-IFA 028 v3.1.1 (ETSI January 2018)—the entire contents of each are hereby incorporated by reference herein—that enable the NFV-MANO system to manage the deployment, connectivity and resource orchestration of the NS across multiple NFVI-PoPs that are federated over a wide area network (WAN) infrastructure.
With respect to a distributed NFV-MANO system, one approach is that each tenant has its own MANO stack (referred to as tenant-MANO (t-MANO)) that is under the control of a central MANO in order to provide management autonomy to the tenants (i.e., NS and/or resource owners). See e.g., International Patent Application No. PCT/EP2018/061426 (the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference herein).
In all the above NFV-MANO approaches, the underlying assumption is that the NFV-MANO system, whether centralized or distributed, is deployed at fixed locations, referred herein as fixed NFVI-PoPs (fNFVI-PoPs), which may be at the core DC or the edge DC of the overall network architecture. The end-users (or end-entities) connect to the respective MANO system at the edge/core DCs for service delivery.